S.F. struggles to stop, solve killings

Published 4:00 am, Friday, January 2, 2009

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Carolyn Alexander, left, hugs Lenora Ann McCall during a meeting of the Healing Circle support group for survivors of homicide victims in San Francisco, Calif., on Thursday, Dec. 11, 2008. McCall's daughter Milika Fields with killed by gunfire on May 31 of this year. Looking on is Larry Wilson, right. less

Carolyn Alexander, left, hugs Lenora Ann McCall during a meeting of the Healing Circle support group for survivors of homicide victims in San Francisco, Calif., on Thursday, Dec. 11, 2008. McCall's daughter ... more

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

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A photograph of Caprisha Green adorns a memorial shrine erected by friends and neighbors near the spot where she was killed at the Potrero Terrace housing complex.

A photograph of Caprisha Green adorns a memorial shrine erected by friends and neighbors near the spot where she was killed at the Potrero Terrace housing complex.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

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Lenora Ann McCall, far left, joins hands with other survivors of homicide victims at a meeting of the Healing Circle support group in San Francisco. McCall's daughter, Milika Fields, was killed by gunfire on May 31, 2008. less

Lenora Ann McCall, far left, joins hands with other survivors of homicide victims at a meeting of the Healing Circle support group in San Francisco. McCall's daughter, Milika Fields, was killed by gunfire on ... more

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

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Sylvia Hernandez stands in front of her home at the Potrero Terrace housing complex in San Francisco. Her neighbor Caprisha Green was killed by a stray bullet in September 2008.

Sylvia Hernandez stands in front of her home at the Potrero Terrace housing complex in San Francisco. Her neighbor Caprisha Green was killed by a stray bullet in September 2008.

It's been more than three months and the rainy season has begun, but the memorial to Caprisha Green remains, ringing a tree near her home with photos, cards, candles, flowers and liquor bottles. A neighbor tends to it, tidying a monument to one of San Francisco's messiest problems.

A bubbly 19-year-old with a 1-year-old daughter, Green became the 77th homicide victim in San Francisco in 2008 when she was hit by a stray bullet during a gunfight Sept. 13 in her Potrero Terrace housing project. The city ended the year with 98 homicides - the same total as 2007, which was the most since 1995.

"It makes it harder," said Green's mother, Zsa Zsa Randall, referring to the fact that her daughter died in a fight she had nothing to do with. "A bullet don't have no eyes. Bullets don't have no names on them."

Randall is one of many people trying to make sense of a homicide toll that has eluded clear explanations.

Police have theories, pointing to the ubiquity of guns on the street and to cavalier attitudes toward violence. They are trying to counterattack with a deeper focus on five neighborhoods where many of the city's slayings happen.

The killings have put pressure on leaders including Mayor Gavin Newsom, who said in 2004 that critics should try to recall him if an upswing of homicides continued. The number of slayings in the city that year was 88, up from 69 the year before.

Newsom, who has kept up a practice of visiting crime scenes well into his second term, said in an interview he is frustrated that killings had risen in the face of efforts to reduce them.

Among other recent initiatives, city officials have hired and reassigned police officers, increased rewards and witness protection, spent more on community outreach groups and installed cameras on high-crime corners.

"It's ready, fire, aim," Newsom said, purposefully rearranging the old expression. "Nothing that I have tried to resolve has been more frustrating and vexing than solving the issue of why a 14-year-old would take the life of a 15-year-old with a weapon of war."

Newsom said of 2008's homicide total, "I'm not going to accept it. We're going to mix things up in the next year."

New police chief

Those changes will include a new police chief. Heather Fong, whom Newsom named to run the department shortly after he took office in January 2004, announced last month that she will retire in April. A national search has begun for a replacement.

San Francisco police said Thursday that they recorded 97 homicides in 2008 after reclassifying one case that they said did not fit the definition of a homicide. The Chronicle's count of 98 includes the discovery of a body on Ocean Beach that is being handled by U.S. Park Service police.

The case that was reclassified was the October death of Cynthia Sareen Weaver, who authorities said climbed out of her bathroom window to get away from her abusive boyfriend and suffered a fatal fall. Weaver's boyfriend, Eloy John Muniz, is charged with murder.

The city's 2008 homicide count was near the average for the past three decades of 90 killings a year and was well below the all-time high of 141, set in 1977. But the move toward triple digits is part of a violent trend, one that arrived after a period of relative calm in San Francisco and the rest of the country that took hold in the mid-1990s.

San Francisco averaged 64 homicides a year from 2000 to 2003. Since then, the average has been 93 a year - a rise of 45 percent. Statewide, killings were up less than 10 percent in the same period.

San Francisco is not alone: Richmond and Oakland killings have spiked recently as well. Oakland, which has half as many residents as San Francisco, had 145 killings in 2006 and 123 in 2008.

The homicides can leave profound devastation in their wake.

When Milika Fields, a 31-year-old aspiring nurse, was fatally shot on May 31 while driving with her younger brother on Highway 101 in San Francisco, she left behind six children - including 3-year-old twin boys who witnessed their mother's death from their safety seats.

Their father had fallen into a coma a year earlier because of a heart condition. He remains on life support, so the children - plagued by nightmares - live in Bayview-Hunters Point with their grandmother, Lenora Ann McCall, who is struggling to hang on.

McCall said her daughter's killing left her scared, depressed and suffering from panic attacks. She is raising the children on disability payments and their mother's death benefits. She said she now feels uncomfortable in San Francisco and is planning to move to the Peninsula.

McCall wants to know who killed her daughter and, in the process, wounded her son and one of her grandsons. All she knows, she said, is that two men and two women had approached Fields minutes earlier at a gas station, asking if she knew them.

"We're getting through it, but it's really hard," McCall said. "The kids are very, very angry, and they're asking me why, and I don't have an answer for it."

Old problems intensify

Deputy Police Chief David Shinn said younger and younger people are toting guns. Often they use military-style rifles; it's common, he said, for officers to find 30 or 40 spent shells after a shooting.

Shinn pointed to "a kind of prison attitude" on city streets, where helping officers catch killers is taboo and a person who feels disrespected must strike back fiercely to send a message.

But Franklin Zimring, a criminologist and professor at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, said he hadn't seen a distinct trend in San Francisco - or Oakland or Richmond - that would explain the homicide numbers.

"It is much more likely that what we're seeing here is a slightly more concentrated edition of the chronic problems we've been having for decades in these cities, rather than something new," Zimring said.

The number of shooting deaths in San Francisco has gone up, with the number of other types of killings unchanged. Russ Giuntini, the city's chief assistant district attorney, said San Francisco has the desire - but not the power - to regulate guns.

"Until we have a meaningful national gun policy," he said, "we can be as well intentioned as we want to be."

Some neighborhood leaders said the slumping economy has left more people jobless and desperate. They are pushing for government agencies to provide more opportunities for at-risk youth, and for teenagers and their parents to take more personal responsibility.

Shawn Richard, founder of the nonprofit group Brothers Against Guns, said young ex-convicts for whom his organization finds jobs often go straight "once they take that initial step."

"First, they've got to want to do it. They have to understand they've been falling their whole life," said Richard, who lost both his brothers to gun killings in the 1990s. "When they start getting a check every two weeks, they say, 'Man, I ain't got time to be out there on those streets.' "

New police strategies

In looking for ways to cut homicides, San Francisco officials have drawn a clearer picture of how they happen and how concentrated they are. Much of the city is almost unscathed.

A study of San Francisco's 98 homicides in 2007 by researchers at UC Berkeley's law school found that they routinely involved the same gangs terrorizing the same neighborhoods. Almost three-fourths of arrested suspects - and more than three-fourths of victims - had criminal records.

In any given year, almost 95 percent of victims younger than 25 are high school dropouts, prosecutors said.

In 2008, 80 percent of homicide victims in San Francisco were shot. Almost half the victims were black, even though African Americans make up less than 7 percent of the city's population.

Working with the authors of the crime study, police began a new strategy in February in five neighborhoods: the Mission District, Tenderloin, Western Addition, Bayview and Visitacion Valley. Officers from patrol, gang, narcotics and other units team with probation officers, the California Highway Patrol and others to saturate the hot spots.

Shinn said police are also dispatching more officers to killings and starting a night homicide detail in order to get inspectors on the scene quicker. Detectives previously worked only day shifts.

Officials pointed to some positive results. Nonfatal shootings were down 34 percent in 2008 through mid-November, from 428 to 283. Gun seizures were up 13 percent, from 944 to 1,063.

Homicides were down in four of the five high-crime zones. But they were up in the Mission, where there were spasms of gang-related violence in September despite a heavy police presence.

Witness help is key

Police said inspectors had arrested suspects in about 30 percent of the homicides that happened in 2008. If witnesses talk, Shinn said, a case will usually be solved.

In Caprisha Green's neighborhood, where a second person was shot dead in May, residents say they are tired of the violence.

They say Potrero Terrace - where rundown apartments, some boarded up, have a view of Interstate 280 and Candlestick Park - is ravaged by residents' addiction to crack cocaine and other drugs, and that gunfire can be heard almost daily.

Longtime resident Sylvia Hernandez said she believes the development needs a constant police presence, from dusk to dawn.

Hernandez takes care of her elderly mother and is nanny to her 2-year-old grandson during the day. She said she is afraid for her family's safety, but they live on Social Security benefits and can't afford to move.

Standing on a ball field above Potrero Terrace, Charles Bryant said he is one of many people still hurting from Green's death. The longtime director at the Potrero Hill Recreation Center coached the teenager in softball when she was 12.

"She straight didn't deserve it," he said.

Green's killer remains on the loose. Looking down the hill, Bryant said of some of her neighbors, "They know who did it. And they probably want to talk (to police). But there's consequences to that."

Online: For locations and details of individual homicides in San Francisco in 2007 and 2008, go to sfgate.com/maps/sfhomicides

Online: For locations and details of individual homicides in San Francisco in 2007 and 2008, go to sfgate.com/maps/sfhomicides

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